Analysts at Gartner have added up some numbers, thrown some runes, and reached the conclusion that the social software and collaboration market will rack up $4.5 billion in revenues in 2021 with double-digit growth expected through 2022.
The analyst firm claims remote home working and social software integrations within other enterprise applications has driven significant growth, forecasting a rise of 17.1 per cent from 2020.
Gartner research vice president, Craig Roth said that use cases for the social and collaboration market, such as coordinating a distributed workforce and providing a ‘virtual water cooler,’ got a sudden jolt from the pandemic and such tools went from a ‘nice to have’ to a ‘must have’ within a matter of weeks.
The research firm added that additional investment in technologies will continue even as office work returns, in order to “facilitate, capture and organise open conversations and information sharing”.
Gartner predicted that by 2025, nearly 65 percent of enterprise application software providers will have included some form of social software and collaboration functionality in their software product portfolios.
“Providers of packaged business applications, such as ERP and CRM software, have previously offered basic social and collaboration functionality. They are now facing heightened expectations about the seamless inclusion of nonroutine tasks, such as conversations and marking up content, within their process-oriented products”, Roth said.
